Rep. Henry A. Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, might ask White House officials to testify about their actions involving the CIA leak case, Democratic sources tell Politico.

President Bush has resisted past calls for appearances by his advisers, so the request could provoke another showdown between the White House and the new Democratic Congress.

Valerie Plame, the former CIA operative at the center of the case that led to last week’s conviction of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, will be the star witness when Waxman says he will hold a hearing Friday into “whether White House officials followed appropriate procedures for safeguarding” her identity.

Congressional sources say Republicans have made a tentative request to call Victoria Toensing, an outspoken lawyer who was instrumental in writing the law protecting the identities of intelligence agents. She contends that no crime was committed in the outing of Plame.

Waxman is also seeking a sit-down with special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who has not yet responded, according to committee sources.

“To this day, no one has a complete understanding of what happened at the White House: Was this accidental or deliberate?” said a Democratic official familiar with the committee’s strategy. “The people who have the answers to that are in the White House."

If Waxman presses ahead with the White House, he could assert he was following precedents set by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who was the committee chairman when Bill Clinton was president.

“This White house has been successful in changing the goal posts so that it’s almost impossible to get information from them or get people to testify,” the Democratic official said. “What was common during the Clinton years has become nonexistent.”

In response, David Marin, the committee’s Republican staff director, said, “So basically Chairman Waxman is now mimicking the Burtonian strategies he once decried? I guess fairness depends on where you're sitting. Did the Bush White House move the goal posts, or has Mr. Waxman?"

A senior administration official said the White House is preparing for numerous investigations by Democrats, who now control both the House and the Senate. “They’re going to be getting up in our cupboards on all sorts of matters,” the official said. Fred Fielding, who took over as White House counsel this year after the departure of Harriet Miers, is hiring more staff as he prepares for congressional negotiations.

Administration officials say Fielding, a lawyer in the Nixon White House and chief counsel to President Ronald Reagan, plans to cooperate, avoiding confrontation where he can.

Friday’s hearing with Plame will be carried live on the committee’s Website, www.oversight.house.gov. And depending on what the Central Intelligence Agency clears her to say, Plame may rebut assertions by some conservatives that she had a lower level of covert status.

She is expected to contend that she had no direct role in sending her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, on a mission to Niger. And Democrats are likely to try to tease out the consequences of her exposure and inquire about the potential impact of exposure on others who are undercover.

Toensing, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration and frequent legal analyst on television, helped write the law protecting intelligence agents when she was chief counsel for Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, from 1981 to 1984.

If Republicans formalize their request for her testimony, Waxman will decide whether it would be relevant, the Democratic sources said. In a piece in The Washington Post’s Outlook section on Feb. 18, Toensing wrote that Fitzgerald had ignored “the fact that there was no basis for a criminal investigation from the day he was appointed” and that the CIA only objected to the leak of Plame’s identity “to cover its derriere.”

The committee’s two-page letter to Fitzgerald asks him to meet with Waxman and Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), the committee’s ranking member, to discuss “whether the White House took appropriate legal action following the leak and whether the existing requirements are sufficient to protect against future leaks.”

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Waxman is determined to be an activist on many fronts. He’s just asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for more information about the president’s claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger. And he’s even considering a hearing about the surprise announcement Sunday by Halliburton that its chief executive would move from Houston to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

Waxman has vowed to conduct oversight of the White House executive offices. But last year when Davis was chairman, Waxman asked him to conduct an investigation into why Fitzgerald was not pursuing criminal charges against senior adviser Karl Rove – and Davis refused.

Waxman says on his Web site that he sees “ample precedent for White House testimony.” Hinting at the aggressive role he intends to play, the congressman wrote a report when he was in the minority that documents all the material the Clinton White House provided Congress, including internal e-mails, FBI interview notes, confidential communications from the White House Counsel’s Office and information about White House contacts with private individuals.

The committee’s Web site includes a 2004 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress that documents many such appearances by presidential advisers.

The report notes that Congress “may encounter legal and political problems in attempting to enforce a subpoena to a presidential adviser.” And it lists more than 70 instances dating back to 1944 when a presidential adviser testified before a committee or subcommittee.

More than 45 of the instances occurred during the Clinton administration, including appearances by National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, senior adviser George Stephanopoulos and counsels Charles F.C. Ruff and Beth Nolan.